Brief Thoughts on a New Malick Book

 

I didn’t know about this book (Martin Woessner’s Terrence Malick and the Examined Life [2024]) until I randomly happened upon it at the library a couple of months ago. I instinctively checked it out and have been gradually making my way through it during free throw breaks during the NBA playoffs and other interstitial moments in my life, until I finally sped through the last few chapters today because it’s due back and I want it out of the way so I can focus on material more pertinent to my current project. I have some thoughts about it and when I started typing them out it got longer than a tweet, so I decided to write this little blog post, which because written on a whim will be brief and non-exhaustive. Verdict: the book is O.K. It definitely has a decent amount to recommend to anyone interested in Malick—heavy contextualization of the state of philosophy both in general in the mid-to-late 20th century and specifically at Harvard around Malick’s time there in the 1960s, as well as detailed information about the AFI’s inaugural film school and Malick’s activities there; a deeply researched accounting of Malick’s wide and disparate influences both artistic and otherwise (I particularly found insightful the pinpointing of Jean Renoir as a stylistic influence on Malick as it pertains to his penchant for nature montage, including Renoir’s 1959 film Picnic in the Grass, a rare and still-unseen-by-me-because-of-that-reason picture that was the topic of discussion at a March 1970 Center for Advanced Film Studies seminar that Malick introduced); as well as other miscellaneous trivia / interesting ephemera about Malick that I had never heard before or had forgotten about, scattered throughout the book—but my main disappointment with the book can be hinted at by a simple mathematical accounting of the book’s content structure: full chapters on Badlands (47 pages), Days of Heaven (36 pages), The Thin Red Line (37 pages), The New World (37 pages), and The Tree of Life (39 pages), but then only one combined chapter on To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Voyage of Time (43 pages) and on Song to Song and A Hidden Life (47 pages). Woessner’s enthusiasm progressively starts to wane slightly as we hit To the Wonder and Knight of Cups and then reaches an obvious low point with Song to Song, where he goes from mostly hiding behind quotes from dissatisfied and confused critics to speaking outright on his opinion of it being lesser Malick. He still continues to provide interesting reference points and discussion of Malick’s evolution as a film-philosopher, so they aren’t totally worthless, but I’d be lying if I didn’t start to get a little worked-up during the Song to Song section in particular. He comes back to life a bit in the A Hidden Life section, a predictable move, but you can still sense that he’s uncomfortable to a certain degree with Malick’s progressive turn away from what one would probably call philosophy towards what one would probably call theology. His decision to do away with the common grouping of the three contemporary-set films does, however, strike me as usefully thought-provoking; he instead groups The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and Knight of Cups as part of what he calls the “confessional” trilogy—films explicitly based on parts of Malick’s biography—and recategorizes Song to Song next to A Hidden Life, two films that are more explicitly Christian in their outlook. As noted before, Woessner can’t quite hide his skepticism of the theological forwardness of these works, at least to the degree that in his mind it overshadows the philosophical or, in the case of A Hidden Life, the political; as a philosopher and academic, Woessner obviously seems more comfortable with questions than answers, and is noticeably more interested in the searching, wondering films of Malick’s pre-2012 career than his more “didactic,” per him, recent works. But another thing his regrouping of the 2010s films might hint at is an emphasis on Malick the thinker-philosopher rather than Malick the poet-stylist. There is a heavy imbalance throughout the book—I’d generously estimate it at 90/10—between discussion of ideas and discussion of style. I recognize that this is his prerogative as a writer coming from the academic field of philosophy, but I mention it because this seems to be the case for almost every book that gets written on Malick these days (caveat: I might be wrong, I haven’t read basically any of them, and it’s partly for this reason), and because, to me, any true accounting of Malick as an artist needs to grapple at-length with what he’s doing on the very specific level of cinema as an art. Even though Woessner tries to go beyond the academicism of other writings on Malick—the book jacket claims that it “suggests it is time for philosophy to be viewed not merely as an academic subject, overseen by experts, but also as a way of life, open to each and every moviegoer”—as an academic his writing still inherently has an academicism to it that, while certainly readable, can’t quite jump into the thick of life the way many of the texts and films he references are able to. Nevertheless, to repeat the praise from the beginning, there’s enough here to interest the average Malick fanatic to warrant a look; apparently “newly available archival sources” were used by the author, and the information and insight those sources provide is probably the #1 reason why I’d tell someone to pick up the book if they were interested. Finally, part of the reason I find myself with many of the criticisms mentioned here, and that I’ve felt like taking the time to write them out, is that I’ve been increasingly envisioning myself as a writer of books, and it’s something I hope to make a vocation out of if the world will allow it. I’m in the trenches of attempting it right now, and I hope I will have good news to share on that front in the near future. But to return to Malick—after years of mostly refraining from trying to write about his films, I think I’ve finally reached a point where I’m looking forward to the day that I’ll be able to write my own book about them. (Such a book would probably be too concerned with theology to interest many cinephiles and too concerned with cinema to interest many theologians, so who knows how in the world I’d get it published, but that’s a future battle I’ll fight when I get there.) In the meantime, however, reading this new Malick book has inspired me to once again go back and take a chronological look at the films, and to take a very casual, preliminary stab at writing about them. The results of that can be found on my Letterboxd, where as of this writing I’ve scribbled notes about Badlands and Days of Heaven so far.